Americans encountered Hinduism in the late eighteenth century, when sea captains from ports such as Salem, Massachusetts, first sailed into Indian waters. But immigration from India to the United States did not begin in earnest until over two hundred years later – in the first decade of the twentieth century. What Americans learned of Hinduism in the interim they typically got from books, notably missionary accounts, travelogues, and translations of Hindu scriptures. In those books, Americans learned both to love and to hate Hinduism. Christian missionaries, at least until the late nineteenth century, typically denounced living Hindus as heathens. But some intellectuals, from the Sanskrit scholars of the eighteenth century to the Transcendentalists and Theosophists of the nineteenth, praised ancient Hindu scriptures for their lofty literature and sublime spiritual ideals.
Still the dominant tone was condemnation. In Following the Equator, a travelogue published in 1897, Mark Twain lent the critics an able pen, popularizing a host of negative stereotypes about India and Hinduism. Both Hinduism and its homeland, Twain wrote, were ancient yet childish. The country was unspeakably dirty and its people oversexed. The Hindu religion, moreover, amounted to idol worship and Hindu yogis were more intent on making money than seeking spiritual liberation. Of the images of the Hindu gods in the Indian city of Banares ("Idolville," he called it), Twain wrote, "And what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols – and all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreams at night, a wild mob of nightmares."
As long as Asian Indians remained in their homeland, such "nightmares" were visited only upon tourists and missionaries who, under the aegis of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, or ABCFM, first went to India in 1812. But when Hindus began arriving in the United States, Hinduism became a domestic matter. Asian Indians came to the United States long after the Chinese and Japanese immigration waves, and they disembarked in far fewer numbers. Although there are records of an Asian Indian visiting Massachusetts as early as the 1790s, Indian immigrants did not arrive in significant numbers until the first decade of the twentieth century, and even then the figures were modest. By 1920, only about 6,400 had come. Although Asian Indian immigrants were all called "Hindoos," most were actually Sikhs, practitioners of a religious tradition which originated in the Punjab region of North India in the sixteenth century. Roughly one third were Muslims, and only a small portion practiced what we now refer to as Hinduism.
Like the Chinese and Japanese who preceded them, Asian Indians were met with hostility. This hostility led to violence in September 1907 in Bellingham, Washington, where a riot spearheaded by hundreds of white workers caused seven hundred Indian laborers to flee across the border into Canada. Soon the Asiatic Exclusion League, which in the past had fulminated against the "yellow peril" from China and Japan, was denouncing Indian immigrants.
Rather than rebuking this nativism, the U.S. government codified it. In 1917, Congress severely restricted Asian Indian immigration by placing India in a "barred zone" of Asian countries. In 1923, in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians, while admittedly Caucasian, were not "white persons" in the popular sense of that term and, therefore, were not eligible for naturalization. One year later, Congress passed a law cutting off immigration for people not eligible for naturalization, effectively terminating Asian Indian immigration.
Ethnic animus toward Indian immigrants veered into religious bigotry early in the twentieth century. In 1893, Swami Vivekananda became the first Hindu missionary to the United States when he accepted an invitation to represent the Hindu tradition at the World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. A follower of the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, Vivekananda practiced Advaita Vedanta, a form of Hinduism which affirms the essential equivalence of God (Brahman) and the human soul (Atman), as well as bhakti yoga (Hindu devotionalism). In Chicago and in subsequent lectures in cities across the United States, Vivekananda spoke against Christian missions and for religious tolerance. For the most part, he received a respectful hearing as intelligent spokesman for an ancient faith and an able leader of his Vedanta Society (established 1894), the largest Hindu organization in the United States through the first quarter of the twentieth century.
As the Vedanta Society gathered strength, however, American Christians began to denounce both the organization and its swamis, drawing on stereotypes which went back to Twain and the missionary critics of the nineteenth century. In "The Heathen Invasion," published in Hampton-Columbian Magazine in 1911, Mabel Potter Daggett lashed out at Hinduism for luring unsuspecting American women into the "worship of men." "Women who were formerly Baptists and Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics, and daughters of Abraham," wrote Daggett, were being seduced into embracing Hinduism by dark-skinned yogis, who were far more interested in their followers' money and affections than in their souls. This view – that American Hinduism amounted to worship of swarthy Indian men by eccentric American women – also figured in a high-profile lawsuit in Boston in 1911. At issue was the will and mental competence of Sara Bull, a high-society woman whose Cambridge salon had attracted authors such as Julia Ward Howe, Irving Babbitt, and Gertrude Stein and intellectuals such as psychologist William James and social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson. After hearing Swami Vivekananda speak in the late 1890s, Bull had embraced Hinduism. Upon her death in 1911, it was discovered she had left a large sum of money to the Vedantists. But her daughter challenged the will on the grounds that her gullible mother had been duped by her swamis. That argument carried the day and the bequest was nullified.
This theme of Hindu swamis as seducers of naive women was repeated in Mrs. Gross Alexander's Methodist Quarterly Review article, "American Women Going after Heathen Gods" (1912), and in books such as Hinduism in Europe and America by Elizabeth A. Reed (1914) and The Indian Menace (1929) by Mersene Elon Sloan. It reached a mass audience in Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), which denounced India and Hinduism as filthy in both senses of the term. According to Mother India, which was a top-ten bestseller in 1927 and 1928, virtually all of India's social and religious problems could be traced back to one source: Hinduism's obsession with sex. And thanks to immigrant swamis, that obsession was crossing the oceans to the United States – the "largest and richest hunting ground" for that "sex-hungry" faith.
Mayo's blockbuster was widely denounced by Indians, who resented the author's insistence that their homeland was unfit for home rule. Mohandas Gandhi, who led the non-violent fight against British colonization, dismissed the book as a "Drain Inspector's Report" intent not on fostering women's rights but on shooting down India's bid for independence. The book was also criticized by liberal American missionaries, who in the spirit of E. Stanley Jones's conciliatory The Christ of the Indian Road (1925) blasted the book for its ethnocentrism. One of the cleverer retorts appeared in Dhan Gopal Mukerji's A Son of Mother India Answers, published in New York in 1928. Mukerji, after denouncing Mayo as a tourist suffering from "racial myopia," suggested she write an equally biased account of social conditions in the United States. Such a book, he said, would include chapters on:
"The Only Land Where Lynchings Occur"
"The Land of Marital Scandal – One Divorce to Every Seven Marriages"
"The Land of Industrial Strife – Incessant Strikes and Lockouts"
"Child Laborers – A Million and a Half No Older Than Thirteen – in the Richest Land in the World"
In the wake of the immigration restrictions of 1917 and 1924, the Asian Indian population in the United States declined and controversies about a Hindu invasion of the United States subsided. With the opening of immigration from Asia in 1965 and the arrival of a new generation of Indian gurus, however, controversy resurfaced. Now groups such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) were denounced as dangerous "cults." And again the criticism took a sexual turn. While some Hindu-based groups were denounced for practicing celibacy, others were condemned for sexual licentiousness. Hinduism, meanwhile, continued to be denounced as sexist. In Gyn/Ecology (1978), the feminist theologian Mary Daly took a page out of Mother India when she reduced Indian culture in all its complexities to the outlawed practice of suttee.
The selections that follow come from the Hindu controversies of the teens and twenties rather than the eighties and nineties, and all address four interrelated questions: Should Asian Indians be allowed to come to the United States and become citizens? Are Hindu swamis taking advantage of their female followers? Is Hinduism anti-woman? Is India fit for independence?
Indian immigrants did not write many responses to these questions, in part because they did not have the means to be published in widely-read magazines and newspapers. In 1908, however, Overland Monthly of San Francisco invited Girindra Mukerji, an Indian immigrant studying at the University of California, to respond to the anti-Indian climate, more specifically to the Bellingham riot of the previous year. In "The Hindu in America," Mukerji presents a measured appeal for religious and racial toleration ("from the oldest civilization to the newest") and urges Americans to permit young people like himself to continue to come to the United States to study. He reminds his readers that Hindu swamis are not trying to make U.S. converts and that Indians are, like most Americans, Caucasians. Although Mukerji does not identify himself religiously in the article, it is fair to assume from the contents of the piece and from his name that he was a Hindu from Bengal, a province in northern India.
In Hinduism in Europe and America (1914), Elizabeth Armstrong Reed makes the alarmist case against Hindu swamis. The bitter fruit of their "hypnotic influence," argues Reed, is nothing less than "abject slavery" and insanity. While this book represents a fairly standard critique in this genre, it is noteworthy because Reed was widely known before 1914 as a disinterested scholar of Hinduism and Buddhism. Before she wrote Hinduism in Europe and America, Reed produced scholarly books on ancient Hinduism and early Buddhism. In the process, she earned the praise of respected Orientalists like F. Max Müller and election into the Royal Asiatic Society. A devout Christian, Reed was married to Hiram V. Reed, a preacher in the Campbellite tradition, an outgrowth of frontier Presbyterianism which sought to revive Christianity by reshaping it along the lines of the primitive church.
A short selection from Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927) comes next. In this excerpt, taken from a chapter called "Slave Mentality," Mayo lays down her main argument: that India is a dying nation whose weakness can be traced to one cause, namely a national obsession with sex. Here Mayo clearly betrays a promise, made at the beginning of Mother India, to confine her analysis to secular matters such as public health and to "[leave] untouched the [realm] of religion."
Two replies to Mother India follow. First is a book review published in 1928 in The Atlantic Monthly. Written by an American missionary, this review shows that not all Christian missionaries in India embraced Mayo with open arms. The second selection attends to Mayo obliquely rather than directly. It is written by Laura Glenn, who like Sara Bull was a prominent American convert to the Vedanta Society. Like Bull, Glenn came to Hinduism after listening to Swami Vivekananda lecture. But Glenn eventually took Swami Paramananda, the founder of Vedanta outposts in both Boston and Los Angeles, as her guru. Upon her conversion to Hinduism, Glenn took the name Sister Devamata ("Mother of the Gods"). A prolific writer and editor, she edited The Message of the East, a Boston-based Vedantist journal, and lectured widely on Hinduism both in the United States and in India. She was also Swami Paramananda's most valued assistant. In this selection, from Days in an Indian Monastery (1927), a memoir of her years spent in India, Sister Devamata presents a picture of women in Hinduism very different from Mayo's representation. Although Devamata's claims will no doubt sound old-fashioned to contemporary feminists, they represented a significant departure from conventional wisdom at the time she first wrote them down.
Five centuries ago Columbus started out for India; the nuggets of India had been the great attraction of the ambitious merchants, mariners and monarchs of Europe. The wealth of India has been the theme of the poets – Milton, in his famous epic, "Paradise Lost," talks of "the wealth of Ormuz and Ind." After years of adventures, Columbus struck on land which, though not India, more than satisfied the cravings for gold. Columbus, mistaking this land as the long searched for India, named the aborigines Indians. Thus, America, from the day of her discovery, becomes associated with India.
The people of India, on the other hand, never knew how they were discovered in some other land, how they had been classed with the aborigines of some other race quite distinct from their own. They did not know how they were made known to European people as dressed up in blankets, feathers and tattooed all over the body.
But real India was not forgotten. The great navigators sailed their vessels round the farthest end of Africa. The route retains the name of "Good Hope." In spite of the perilous voyage and the tropical heat which they had to encounter, the hope of reaching India meant so much to them that they named the point in South Africa the Cape of Good Hope. At last, the Europeans reached India. The East India Company was organized. The exploitation of India began with all the energy of the hardy Briton. With the years, America grew as a civilized country, and finally became an independent State, and during this period, India fell completely a victim to English dominance. India continued to exist only to be exploited and all but destroyed. America became one of the great nations of the earth.
The varied destines of these two nations went on with time, until today each represents the opposite pole of advancement. The people of India come from the same race as the Europeans who have transformed the vast waste territory of America into the most interesting place on the earth. India, linked politically for 150 years with England, with her grand history and her centuries of civilization, is an object of pity and compassion all over the world. . . .
Hopefully, India looks to this great country of the United States. . . . The year 1901-1902 brought the first pioneer Hindu students to the schools of the Pacific Coast. . . . The State of California had no Hindu student till the year 1904. With the advent of some energetic and public spirited young men, the University of California became the headquarters of the largest number of Indian students in the whole union. . . . These young men are highly patriotic, and they have easily adapted themselves to the American environments. The American or casual observer would hardly notice any semblance or vestige of the caste system in their lives; here are the students of the highest caste, as well as from the lowest, living in amity. The unity of thought and purpose has harmonized their mode of living and association has smoothed away the mystical myths of centuries. No family or social distinction amongst themselves or any restriction as to food stuffs which might have been considered most objectionable in India, does stand in their way of fitting themselves, in American homes, as representatives of a new race in India. . . .
Official statistics show conclusively that the emigration of the Hindus . . . is invariably limited to the Sikhs and the Pathans, formerly in the English army. These Sikhs and Panthans are the inhabitants of the Punjab – the most fertile part of all India. The Punjab watered by five rivers was once the granary of this northern country, and is now quite unable to provide a living for a most abstemious and easily contented people. Of late, the emigration has been reaching such an alarming point that great consternation has been felt by the British, and in the United States threatens to bring on another racial and international complication. The laboring class sees the great danger of low wages as a result of competition with Asiatic labor, and the probability is not remote that the Indian will be ousted from the means of earning a livelihood in factories and on the railroads. The American, especially the inhabitant of this Western coast, sees the spectre of another "yellow peril," and one prominent newspaper declared the Hindus "outlaws" in this country. The public mind seemed to be in such a disordered state that the better class of the Hindus here blushed for shame for their fellow man. The law courts declared the Hindus as "undesirable," not fit to become citizens of the State. The riot in Bellingham was the culminating point of the Hindus' distress. . . .
The Hindus, driven from pillar to post, at present, are mostly working on railroads, in factories and few are peddling in the streets of San Francisco and Oakland. About one to two thousand is estimated as their total number in the whole union. Many are employed in the silver mines, Nevada. When the writer was associated with an official enquiry by the United States Government it was found that the Hindus are the most peaceable of all the laboring element and their neighbors unanimously declared that "we are never bothered by the loss of our chickens or other property through them." These men are born agriculturalists. Much can be done in inducing them to cultivate lands and thereby they may prove themselves valuable assets to the state. . . .
There is yet another class of Indians in the United States. Their coming dates from the year 1893, with the opening of the congress of religion at Chicago. India had, in her representative, her only pride and glory – in Philosophy – in Vedantism. Swami Vivekananda, whose name has become almost a household word in this country, was the delegate from India. With the exposition of the Vedantic Philosophy as the most rational of all intellectual conceptions of life and death, Swami Vivekananda, duly realizing the situations created by the enthusiasm evoked in the International Congress of Philosophy and Religion, established centers of the Vedanta Society in different States. The most prominent achievement was made by the patience and energy of Swami Abhedananda, in New York. He has been in this country ten years, and has published many books on Hindu Philosophy. For the first time in America, a systematic attempt at an intellectual appreciation of India began with this movement. "Vedanta," the monthly organ of this society, is now making headway in many homes. A permanent home has been established by the erection of a building in the city of New York. This activity, though similar to the missionary activities of the Occident in the Orient, has kept as its distinctive trait the Indian method. The chief difference is that it is non-proselyting. It aims to disseminate the Indian thought to a broad and intellectual people. It does not profess to have any creed or religious relief to be enforced on those who study, and who are sympathetic intellectually. On the Pacific Coast, the society established its branch in San Francisco, now popularly known as the Hindu Temple. The works are being carried on by two Swamis of the Vedantists. . . .
It will easily be seen that the [commercial] relations with the United States, via the Pacific, are as yet nominal, but there is the prophecy of an immense inter-communication, a great future exchange of commodity and thought, to be found in the development along American lines of the minds of the youth in your colleges. Who shall say, if we give it in exchange, that a leaven of Hindu philosophy would not improve the humanity and even the business instinct of the strenuous American. India looks to America for a certain kind of help – and it will not be denied. It is an appeal from the oldest civilization to the newest.
Modern Hindu Gurus. The guru is a modern money-making invention who is not mentioned in the earlier literature of India. The word originally meant a teacher of the Vedas, and as such it conveyed the idea of respectability, but the Vedic mantras are too voluminous, and prosaic, to attract many pupils, and women are not allowed to study them at all, neither are the lower castes, hence pupils in these classes were so few in number that the income from them was exceedingly small.
The Tantriks, however, were equal to the emergency of furnishing profitable employment for any Brahman who could read, in this way: They gave the name of mantra to some mystic and meaningless syllables, which might be given to the pupil, and taught at a single setting. The lowest castes, and even women, were made eligible to these classes, and almost any Brahman was enabled to collect around him an army of chellas who were bound by their vows to worship him as their god, and to pay a yearly tax to him and his descendants from generation to generation. In this vow the victim swears that: "My soul, mind and body, are irrevocably sold to my guru," whose name is given and then the ownership of his victim becomes absolute. When the sons of a deceased guru make a division of his property, the chellas are counted as so many slaves, and are distributed among the heirs in the same way as other properties belonging to the estate. . . .
The gurus are mostly of two classes, the Tantrik and the Vaishnava. The Tantriks inculcate and enforce the homage to the wives of Shiva, and the worship of courtesans. They also claim that while meeting together for the practice of the Bacchanalian rites, all the members of their orgies have a higher position than that of the most exalted Brahmans.
The Vaishnavas enforce the equally degrading worship of either Krishna, or some other incarnation of Vishnu . . . Both sects agree that the gurus are a necessity, and that they must be well paid by those who have sold themselves, "body, soul, and mind," into this abject slavery. . . .
European and American Fanatics. One would hardly expect to find this confessedly corrupt cult flourishing in the United States, but a book recently written by a Krishna priest and published on American soil is dedicated: "To my Guru, to whom my Soul, Mind, and Body are irrevocably sold, in payment of the grace of this illumination which lighted my path to the Lotus feet of Krishna, my Beloved."
Hence we can easily see the character of the vows which must finally be taken by this man's devotees, and cease to wonder that so many of them find at last a refuge – not in Krishna, but in the asylums.
And yet, knowing these things, the Swamis are constantly advocating Krishnaism on both European and American soil. They know their own official works are the exponents of the character of the boy thief, the dishonorable warrior, the licentious lover, and all of the unspeakable obscenity connected even with his public worship, in places where they dare go through with the whole ceremony, and they know that this idolatry is utterly degrading to all who are tainted therewith, and yet they are persisting teaching it . . .
Family ties are not allowed to intervene in any way between the Swamis and their devotees, for the official statement is: "It knows no barrier! We know thee, O Krishna [or thy representatives,] as one greater and nearer to us than our husbands, brothers, and fathers; and even at the risk of their displeasure to us, we come to lay at thy feet our poor offerings and our hearts."
It was in harmony with this creed that the wife of a prominent educator abandoned her family with the announcement: "My husband and children are no more to me than others who are equally deserving of my regard. My religion teaches me that they have no claim on me!" . . .
A well-known New England woman, having fallen under the hypnotic sway of a Swami, made over her entire fortune at his dictation. After the papers were safely made out, the "further mysteries" were revealed to her. Can we wonder that she then went hopelessly insane and was for years in the asylum?
The Gurus do not, as yet, bring their most hideous idols with them – only some little image before which to say one's prayers "so as to aid in concentration." But far worse than idolatry before images is the man-worship which they inculcate and enforce – the slavish devotion to the priests.
One well-known Swami was in the habit of receiving the adoration of his followers, when he came out of his "daily meditation. Then these American women were ready to caress his robe, and kiss his sandaled feet . . .
Let the white women beware of the hypnotic influence of the East – let her remember that when her Guru, or god-man, has once whispered his mystic syllables into her ear and she has sworn allegiance to him, she is forever helpless in his hands. . . .
Certain it is, that if our clean-hearted American women were acquainted with the true character of the cult, they would flee its contaminating influence. But "the further mysteries" are not revealed until the victim is beyond the reach of any returning mental health, and the descent to heathenism has been so gradual, and the way has been painted in such alluring colors, that she has been unconscious of her destination until it was too late.
Let our people read the standard Hindu works on this subject – let them look into the pages of the Vishnu-purana, which may be found in English translation in our large libraries, let them study the Bhagavata-purana; they are both devoted to the glorification of Krishna, and they both show him to be the worst type of a shameless sensualist, faithless lover, and undutiful son. Lacking these, let them read the works of English scholars like Sir Monier Monier-Williams or Prof. F. Max Müller. If they will only investigate the matter in any sane and scholarly way, all illusions on the subject will quickly vanish, and the priests of Hinduism will no longer be able to "creep into houses and lead captive silly women."
The whole pyramid of the Indian's woes, material and spiritual – poverty, sickness, ignorance, political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting that subconscious conviction of inferiority which he forever bares and advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social affronts – rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is, simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life thenceforward.
The Indian girl, in common practice, looks for motherhood nine months after reaching puberty – or anywhere between the ages of fourteen and eight. The latter age is extreme, although in some sections not exceptional; the former is well above the average. Because of her years and upbringing and because countless generations behind her have been bred even as she, she is frail of body. She is also completely unlettered, her stock of knowledge comprising only the ritual of worship of the house of idols, the rites of placation of the wrath of deities and evil spirits, and the detailed ceremony of the service of her husband, who is ritualistically her personal god.
As to the husband, he may be a child scarcely older than herself or he may be a widower of fifty, when he first requires of her his conjugal rights. In any case, whether from immaturity or from exhaustion, he has small vitality to transmit.
The little mother goes through a destructive pregnancy, ending in a confinement whose peculiar tortures will not be imagined unless in detail explained.
The infant that survives the birth-strain – a feeble creature at best, bankrupt in bone-stuff and vitality, often venereally poisoned, always predisposed to any malady that may be afloat – must look to his child-mother for care. Ignorant of the laws of hygiene, guided only by the most primitive superstitions, she has no helpers in her task other than the older women of the household, whose knowledge, despite their years, is little greater than hers. Because of her place in the social system, child-bearing and matters of procreation are the woman's one interest in life, her one subject of conversation, be her caste high or low. Therefore, the child growing up in the home learns, from earliest grasp of word and act, to dwell upon sex relations.
Siva, one of the greatest of the Hindu deities, is represented, on highroad shrines, in the temples, on the little altar of the home, or in personal amulets, by the image of the male generative organ, in which shape he receives the daily sacrifices of the devout. The followers of Vishnu, multitudinous in the south, from their childhood wear painted upon their foreheads the sign of the function of generation. And although it is accepted that the ancient inventors of these and kindred emblems intended them as aids to the climbing of spiritual heights, practice and extremely detailed narratives of the intimacies of the gods, preserved in the hymns of the fireside, give them literal meaning and suggestive power, as well as religious sanction in the common mind. . . .
And, even though the sex-symbols themselves were not present, there are the sculptures and paintings on temple walls and temple chariots, on palace doors and street-wall frescoes, realistically demonstrating every conceivable aspect and humor of sex contact; there are the eternal songs on the lips of the women of the household; there is, in brief, the occupation and preoccupation of the whole human world within the child's vision, to predispose thought. . . .
Once more, then, one is driven to the original conclusion: Given men who enter the world physical bankrupts out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at the age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of Government?
In Mother India, a book which has received remarkable attention both in England and in America, Miss Katherine Mayo presents India as "a sick man growing daily weaker, dying body and brain, of a disease that only himself can cure." What this disease is she states in the following way: "The whole pyramid of India's woe, material and spiritual . . . rests on a rock-bottom physical base. The base is simply this, his manner of getting into the world and his sex life thenceforward." To support this contention Miss Mayo marshals a mass of quotations, tells vividly of her own investigations during some months of feverish activity in India, and makes some startling general assertions, which, if true, would go far to establish her claim.
A perplexed Western public is naturally asking, "Are Miss Mayo's charges true?" I shall attempt in this article to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that her basic assertions are not true, that she has leaped with magnificent agility from one-sided and limited evidence to her general conclusions, and that India remains the same land of mingled sorrow and hope, darkness and vision, weakness and strength, that she was before Miss Mayo made her very American, whirlwind tour. Above all I hope to show that India is on the upward road, with her face toward the morning.
Miss Mayo's chief sin against India was her almost complete blindness to every evidence of health and progress and her morbid overemphasis on every evidence of sickness and decay. The pity is that she has gathered material which, used discriminatingly, might have stung India to the speeding up of reform. It seems to me that she had a fresh and very powerful message on the baleful effects of sex exaggeration and on other prominent abuses, if only she had been able to present it in a balanced and friendly way. If she had pictured the encouraging aspect of things with the same emotional effect which was given to the evils that still exist, we, who have been working for decades for India's physical and social progress, would have welcomed the book as an ally. As it is, Mother India has struck a blow both against truth and against interracial understanding and good will. . . . The influence of this book is, indeed, calculated to lower the tone of civilization by stimulating people in both East and West to interpret each other by whatever is indecent and beastly. . . .
Should I now add to my argument the weight of the most reliable opinion? Miss Mayo has guarded herself against any effect of expert opinion in India by disposing summarily of us all. We missionaries are looking to our support at home and to the effects of our statements upon Indians, and so cannot tell the truth. The position of the official imposes "the policy of the gentle word." Indians see the problem only partially. India is a dying man with "no one, anywhere, enough his friend to hold the mirror up and show him plainly what is killing him." Miss Mayo regards herself as the only one left to do this, and so, single-handed, she shouldered the task. Yet let me venture to call attention to what a few, who know their India well, think of her effort. Mrs. Cousins, who is neither a government servant nor connected with official or missionary circles, and who for twelve years has lived in intimate friendship with the women of India, says, in an article in the October Young Men of India:
While my experience corroborated a large number of her facts and illustrations regarding sex, health, untouchability, and the treatment of animals, I aver that the total impression she conveys to any reader, either inside or outside India, is cruelly and wickedly untrue. Unless read in conjunction with supplementary books on other aspects of India's life and culture . . . it will create nothing but race-resentment. . . . All the sins of India which Miss Mayo marshals with such weight of depression are balanced by her own sins of omission.
Next turn to one of the ablest of India's missionaries, Miss M. M. Underhill. In the International Review of Missions for October, 1927, she says:
"The book shows throughout a lack of any background knowledge of India; and, what is more serious, it shows a lack of appreciation – one might almost say of power to appreciate – in face of a civilization foreign to previous experience. For example, Miss Mayo quotes freely from Mahatma Gandhi, but has completely failed to understand either the man or what he stands for in India. One cannot help asking, "Does Miss Mayo know even now much more of India than she did before going?" We doubt it."
. . . I will cite only one more opinion. It is that of the acknowledged leader of the Social Reform Movement in India, Mr. K. Natarayan, editor of the Indian Social Reformer. . . . This man, whose great life purpose Miss Mayo professes the desire to serve, is stirred by the book to such feeling as I have never known him to show before. In his eyes Miss Mayo reveals "mortal aversion to things Indian." . . . Her statement about the rearing of children in intensive vicious practices he denies with impressive vehemence. He says, "Not only has Miss Katherine Mayo grossly exaggerated the extent and nature of actual evils, but she has, as we shall show, freely indulged in half-truths and untruths without any attempt to verify them.
I cannot see how, if the testimony even of this brief paper is read with any open mind, it is possible to resist the conclusion that Mr. Natarajan and the other friends of Indian progress who have resented Miss Mayo's attack are substantially right. Her assertions about the average age of motherhood are proved to be inaccurate both by census figures of marriage and by carefully gathered medical data. Her statement about the absence of sport from child life is only a glaring instance of what pervades the book. India is not a human beast dying of her indulgences and her corruptions; she is a great people whose remarkable vitality has carried her through many evil customs and mistaken ideals to a new day of hope and renewed vigor of life in which she is beginning to purify herself for her great part in future world service.
Interracial understanding is of all things to be cultivated at this juncture of Indian progress. Those of us who know India can give assurance that her response to open-mindedness and good faith is as immediate, as warm and whole-hearted, as her present bitterness is deep.
Indo-Aryan tradition gives great freedom to women. The Purdah system has no place in it. That sprang up in India as a reflex of Mohammedan domination, which preceded British rule. The Mohammedan did not understand feminine liberty and wherever he prevailed it became necessary to veil the women and withdraw them from public gaze. In Bengal, where Mohammedan influence was strong, even today ladies do not go into the street except in palanquin or carriage. In Madras, where the Mohammedan influence has always been negligible, ladies go about freely, even at nightfall, sometimes followed by a servant, more often alone and with face and head covered. . . .
The mother is the ruling spirit of the house. She holds the key to the strong box and dispenses the money and family treasure. She directs the course of life of the various members of the household and she has sometimes twenty-five or thirty to look after. She regards it as her special privilege to serve them all before she thinks of herself. By choice she sees that every one is fed before she will eat. . . .
Unselfishness is a living, ever-present quality in the Indian woman's heart, a natural, spontaneous attribute of her character. She does not come last because she is put last, but because she covets the place. Many of the usages that are misunderstood by the Occidental world are based on a desire to honor, protect or cherish woman – not to subordinate or dishonor her. Take the custom of the wife walking behind the husband: it arose in the days when to go abroad meant facing many dangers and the first place was a place of peril, the second was a place of protection. With that idea behind it, it has come down the ages.
When a custom is imbedded in the Indo-Aryan social structure, it is extremely difficult to uproot it, for the Indo-Aryans are tenacious of tradition. I do not discuss the problem of the widow, as her position is in a state of transition; old conditions are breaking down and I feel confident that a new order will be established for her in the social readjustment now in progress. She will become, I believe, the teacher and helper and reformer of modern Indian society.
Indian women possess unusual executive abilities. Indo-Aryan annals contain the record of able rulers and administrators among them. One salient instance is known to me. It is that of Rani Rashmani, who lived in the last century and built the Temple on the Ganges where Sri Ramakrishna spent the larger part of his life. She sprang from a humble station and had little schooling, but she managed a large property with great efficiency and even had the courage to oppose the Government in a controversy over some land. She not only defended her rights with fearless determination, but she carried the dispute to the Court, pleaded her own case and won it.
There have been notable spiritual teachers also among the women of India. They are declared to be the authors even of some of the Vedic Scriptures. Sri Ramakrishna's first teacher after his initiation was a woman. I was told by one who was very close to him that she remained with him for eleven years, then went away one day suddenly. She could recite by heart in Sanskrit one hundred thousand lines of Aryan Sacred Writings and was possessed of astounding scriptural learning. She seemed to have acquaintance with all the religious literature of the Aryans and could tell just where even unfamiliar injunctions were to be found. . . .
There have been various gifted poets among the women of modern India, but the Indian woman is primarily a mother and guardian of the sanctity of the home. The home in India is sacred and inviolable. . . . Although house-keeping is simpler in India, the Indian housewife has not fewer duties. She takes many upon herself out of devotion and a feeling of consecration. In homes where there are ample resources and servants the mother still prepares the daily meals by preference. She realizes the physical and spiritual value of food cooked with love and a sense of sanctity and does not wish to deprive her family of this advantage. Indian women have a remarkable gift for cooking and cooking is for them almost a religion. As the food prepared is nearly always offered in the Shrine before it is eaten, its preparation becomes an actual part of the daily worship. In homes where a cook is employed, the ladies of the house frequently keep as their task the paring and cutting of the vegetables for the curry.
The care of the household Sanctuary also is claimed as the mother's privilege. She cleans it, polishes the vessels used in the worship and often conducts the Service. Sometimes the younger members of the family help her. The order of the day in a Madras home is this. Every one is up by six or before. While the women are busy with their house or with the children, the gentlemen see clients, transact business, visit the sick or teach the little ones. Next comes the bath, which is taken by rubbing the body first with soap or a cleansing earth, then pouring water over head and body until earth or soap is rinsed off. The Indian says if you get into a tub of water dirty, the water is no longer clean; how can you get clean by washing in it?
After the bath comes meditation or worship or a pilgrimage to the Temple. Then follows the main meal of the day and when this is over the man of the family go to their office or business. Government offices open at eleven. At one or two o'clock many take Tiffin, a light luncheon usually brought from the home by servants. The restaurant habit is alien to Indian traditions of purity and cleanliness. When the office closes at five, the men on their way home go to a Math or a holy man for an hour of spiritual refreshment and ladies go to the Temple. Evening worship and a late meal close the routine of the day.